US military imagines war without GPS technology
With GPS- guided bombs, armed drones beaming footage via satellite and spy cameras scooping up intel from the heavens, America’s military machine is growing ever more reliant on spacebased technology.
But what would happen if an enemy were to target the military’s satellites, or somehow jam their signals? The disastrous scenario is one the Pentagon knows all too well could happen, and for which it is actively preparing.
“Our force structure today is built around the assumption that we have GPS and we have satellite communications. We are very lethal when we have those things,” said Colonel Richard Zellmann, commander of the 1st Space Brigade based in Colorado.
“But when you start taking away those combat multipliers, we need to go back then to the days of the industrial- age army where you have to have three times as many people as the adversary does.”
About 70 percent of the Army’s major combat systems depend on signals being beamed from space, Zellmann said, a fact that has not slipped the attention of other countries.
“Militaries around the world have begun to understand the advantages that the US has enjoyed because of uncontested access to the space domain,” Zellmann recently told reporters.
Russia and China are both developing satellites capable of maneuvering through space, potentially allowing them to smash into another orbiting object. America, too, has acquired satellites that can move in orbit and inspect or monitor other space objects.